Professional Apathy

We’re more like a family… What a crock of shit! I know: I got suckered by the oldest play in the corpo-rat book, but God damn corporate America. This bullshit of “take the money and run” and “I got mine, fuck the other guys” that infests everything. Yeah, sure, fine: That’s how a company is built, and that’s how a company runs, and nobody starts a business not to make it rich. I get it. But this isn’t about that, this is about being one of “the other guys” in the story. It’s about feeling like the software I’ve helped create for the last 7 years is ultimately meaningless, just a drop in the “get rich quick” scheme bucket some other guy started. To be confused, uncertain, and twisted up in anxious knots because you just don’t understand what an “LOI” means, or what the future holds. A future that I had, probably unwisely, been planning around what felt like an incredibly stable career.

“But Phreak, aren’t you anti-corpo?” Yes! But I’m also a developer, and good luck finding a place that pays a living wage for developers that isn’t: a numbered cubicle, your worth measured by how frequently you commit, and where you can’t change a fontface without sitting through a week of meetings to plan having a meeting to discuss whether you need to meet to propose that change.¹ So you gotta take what you can get when writing code is the only fucking thing you’re good at in this life, and I thought I had it made here. Super small team, super flexible skillsets, constantly shifting focus areas and the thrill of putting out the occasional fire… But best of all: No corporate overlords looking down from on high to ensure the maximum return for shareholders. A supervisor who sits just behind you in the open floorplan office (as annoying as it is when, mid-writing this, the two office ladies decide to be incredibly loud about pictures of bunnies) and a boss who sits just down the short hallway. A boss who used to be a developer himself until he coded himself out of development and into business owner. A boss who knows what it’s like to write software and to feel good about doing it.

I might have talked about this before, but it bears repeating. I knew I nailed the internship when I started telling them about the “cool shit” that I’ve done in the past, and they started telling me about the “cool shit” they were currently working on. It stopped being an interview and started just being three devs talking shop about this awesome thing that they did… And then, within a week, they had me writing a PDF generator which is honestly cool enough to deserve its own article. But that first release, the first time that I could see my code live in a production setting, as a guy who never graduated college and is almost entirely self-taught, what a fucking cool feeling. Like, yeah: It’s still a corpo gig, but it felt better! It felt good to be here. It did feel like a family to be a part of, even as we grew as a company and collected new customers. I mean, it felt like I was here from close enough to the beginning that I could be personally proud of what we were doing, even if my name wasn’t anywhere except a comment documenting my presence somewhere in the code. I was part of it, part of the growth, part of the code, part of the company.

Then we get the email letting us know that big changes were happening. We were being merged, or incorporated, or taken over, or something like that (I’m not checked out in my corpo-speak) but don’t worry because we were “still going to be an independent company” and that things would be “business as usual” but… looking on Glassdoor about this new parent, and seeing what happened to the competitor of ours who they also “acquired”… Losing benefits, losing bonuses, possible salary decreases², and overall having just new “corporate masters” looking down from on high… Not to mention the fact that I just glossed over: they currently own one of our major competitors! I just fail to see the good business sense in this move, unless you only consider it through the lens of a “Well, I got mine, good luck everybody else” cash grab. Putting two rivals under the same roof is just asking for fighting, and for one to gradually absorb the other. Losing all agency over the direction of our software or the company that I’ve learned to love just really sucks. The idea that this little comfortable niche that I’ve dug out for myself is now going to drastically change, if not outright collapse, is terrifying.

And I’m desperately trying not to be greedy, but that threat of layoffs and salary concessions does scare me! Last summer, and following on with last winter, I got my promotion to Senior Developer, and that came with a salary increase that was followed with the standard annual salary increase that I’ve come to expect and have started planning a life around. It’s what let me move into the apartment that I’m in, and this latest increase finally put me in a salary bracket where I felt comfortable considering buying a house: Maybe not immediately, since the market sucks in 2024 and because the current salary wasn’t going to afford a place where I could comfortably live, but the assumed fact that my salary would only increase (even slowly) from where I’m at now meant that I had at least reached the ground floor on what I would consider to be a viable income for entertaining the idea of purchasing a house. Like… I had broken a barrier and could be comfortable in the knowledge that at the very least I wouldn’t ever be back below that threshold. Now it feels like there’s been a rug pulled out and I don’t know where I’ll land: Will the salary continue to be what it is? Will there still be raises? If I overspend a little now, will I be able to trust that in a year or so I’ll be able to have my finances back under control? Or am I facing a cut to my already “below average for the position” salary, which takes the dream of owning a house back out of reach? Will I be laid off, meaning that I can no longer pay rent on the apartment I’m currently at much less consider a mortgage? For fucks sake, I’m a millenial: we don’t have savings – I have enough saved up to cover maybe 2 months at the most (which is a long time to be unemployed, to be sure, but there’s no guarantee that a new job would cover it. After all, I’d be back to the winds of fate)… That’s the uncertainty that’s killing me. Finally feeling safe and secure and like I can be comfortable building a life, and being thrust violently back into uncertain waters.

Which all sort of brings me to my thesis, and the reason for writing all of this, and the meaning of the title: Professional Apathy. What do I do now, and how do I manage to care about a thing that so obviously doesn’t care in return? How do I sit down and buckle up and spend time writing code that is just going to be taken out of my hands, adding value to a construct that now so blatantly refuses to return any of that value to me? I’ve fought to get here, to earn what I have, and struggled to climb myself into a position where I felt truly happy to wake up and do what I do each day… How do I manage to continue to care about this now that I’m standing on the ledge and staring forced redudancy and obsolecence in the eye? How do I find my way back to loving something that is breaking my heart? Can I?

And would I want to?

It strikes me as odd that the man who’s selling the company is talking about coming up with things to do “on a quarterly basis” – The man who spent the meeting more or less announcing that he was “selling his entire stake in the company” and stepping back to work on other projects, sitting here and telling the dev team that we could come up with a plan to run “every year” or “every quarter” as though he was going to be here to see it, or to do it, or to manage it. Sir, you have announced that you’re not retaining any form of control after this. What makes you think that your new masters would have any interest in keeping you around after you’ve packaged everyone here up in a nice, willing, and enthusiastic about “big changes” box and hand delievered us to the guys upstairs. If you’re not here to make them money, you’ll be given a large token severance package and let free to “enjoy your free time” or whatever.

Jenn’s excitement that you’d be “rejoining dev” and “finally able to fix some bugs” are completely ignorant of the fact that, quite simply, you won’t be here. You are delivering your child, and all of us with it, directly into the soulless grips of people who consider things in terms of profits and losses.

And it’s incredibly hard to care about any of this now. Because now it feels like nothing matters